Amanda lost her keys on the way home from the protest march and was locked out of the house for three days. Luckily she had a satchel filled with peanut butter sandwiches and peaches so she didn’t get hungry, and a backpack filled with paint supplies so she didn’t get bored.
She and Alvin had spent two days creeping through the capital city spraying anti-government slogans across the ministry windows after curfew. Now stuck in her own back yard, she was determined to create something more artistic on the broad blank northern-facing wall below the chimney. She had spray paints in primary colors and she fashioned brushes from rolled hydrangea leaves and delicate unopened rose buds. She had a picture in her head of her mother descending the stairs a decade ago carrying her baby sister who was then and forever no more than a toddler. Amanda painted their faces with blood red lips and cheeks crumpled in dimples and laughter. Here on the first day of summer with these make-shift supplies she would dare to create a new world, fantasy memories, an alternative history. Is this courageous? she wondered. Or merely escapist?
After the military coup, Amanda grew up believing no one, trusting nothing unless you could hold it in your own hands. Now she wanted to trust this vision. Maybe because it was so hot outside, camping under the sycamore, maybe she was hallucinating. She painted her mother’s hair blue, and she gave her sister lavender eyes. But there was a new color that was melting together from her blending and her machinations, a new color that arced above the human faces, like an imaginary sky on a planet that doesn’t exist, a color that has no name. Will anyone even be able to see it? Amanda wondered. It was a color from a land without language, a land of pure experience.
On the third day, her father trudged up the driveway after God knows how many losses at the race track. He froze in the doorway between the garage and the yard, staring at the portrait of his late wife and daughter who gazed peaceably down at him, and he began to cry. Amanda awoke from her mattress of leaves. “I didn’t know,” her father said. “I didn’t know you remembered.”
Amanda went to him with open arms. “I’ve been waiting for years for her to show me where to look. Now I know. I am tasting life twice.”
